Rijiju row shows Air India's schizophrenia: Don't know who is the real customer

Air India is a schizophrenic airline. It does not know its genuine customers from its imagined ones. Consider just two bits of recent evidence. A few days back, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was in the middle of a media storm when a member of his entourage – who had left his US entry visa at home – delayed the Air India flight on which they were to travel to the US on official work. As passengers who had already boarded fumed and fretted, Fadnavis’ aide coolly got his visa fetched from home before the aircraft took off. [caption id=“attachment_2323806” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. PTI[/caption] The airline was in the news again yesterday (1 July) when it apparently offloaded three bonafide passengers in order to accommodate the Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju, his assistant, and the J&K Deputy CM Nirmal Singh on the Leh-Delhi flight. Who cares who gets chucked out when ministers have to board? Any airline which treats its regular customers in such a cavalier fashion is doomed to failure. The problem with Air India is that it has already failed commercially, thanks to political meddling , corruption, a bloated workforce, and recalcitrant unions who pushed it over the edge. It is on life support from the government, having been promised Rs 30,000 crore over 10 years. This huge bailout explains why Air India treats its customers badly. The airline knows it is the government which keeps it in business and not passengers. The capital to keep the airline afloat comes from the taxpayer – and the ministers who manage money on her behalf. The money coming from passengers who pay for tickets is merely icing on the cake – not the cake itself. The airline thus considers ministers and bureaucrats as it premium customers, and not fare-paying passengers. This is why it kowtows to politicians and not customers. The only way to change this state of affairs is to privatise the airline (but who will buy a white elephant?) or let it go bust. Or do a bit of both: sell the salable parts and mothball the rest by giving staff a golden handshake. Air India is not just a problem for its hapless customers, but for the survival of the industry itself, where only one airline currently makes serious money (IndiGo). In 2014-15, the airline is estimated to have lost Rs 5,500 crore, and the situation is unlikely to get any better even with lower fuel prices, for the competition remains strong. As _Firstpost_ wrote some time ago: “Air India is like a cancerous cell at the heart of Indian aviation that can infect everyone with its malignancy. The reason is simple: as long as the taxpayer keeps it afloat, no other airline can be viable. A loss-making airline industry is a serious threat to the lives and limbs of passengers as they may be short-changed on safety.” “The truth is India’s aviation policies have been micro-managed to suit the current interests of various players at various points of time. The policies have not been thought out for the long term. If Jet (and Indian Airlines) didn’t want new entrants in the 1990s, then ownership guidelines were tweaked to keep the Tatas and SIA out. If more domestic airlines were keen to fly abroad, rules were introduced to make a minimum of five years’ domestic operation a prerequisite for flying abroad. To protect Air India, more rules were tinkered with. “Such wayward policies ensured that only promoters who were thick with the ministry entered the picture, never mind their solvency or business credibility.” Air India’s promoters are you and me, but the people who decide its survival are not you and me, but netas and babus in Delhi. That is why it sees them as prime customers. Ordinary passengers are just not that important in the airline’s scheme of things. Time to shut it down and put everybody out of his or her misery.